Generate subtitles for your Latvian videos

About Latvian transcription

Latvian (Latviešu) is written in the Latin alphabet and spoken principally in Latvia. Subtitles generated here come back in that script, as ordinary written Latvian, ready to use in an SRT or VTT file.

Latvian marks long vowels with a bar above the letter, and that bar is not optional — it separates words that are otherwise spelled identically. Russian is widely spoken alongside it, so recordings often carry both, and setting the language explicitly avoids a confidently wrong result.

What a Latvian subtitle file looks like

Four lines as they come out of the exported SRT, in the Latin alphabet with the timings taken from the speech itself.

1
00:00:01,000 --> 00:00:03,240
Paldies visiem, ka atnācāt.

2
00:00:03,600 --> 00:00:06,120
Sāksim ar pirmo jautājumu.

3
00:00:06,480 --> 00:00:09,300
Vai jūs mani labi dzirdat?

4
00:00:09,700 --> 00:00:12,040
Detaļas pastāstīšu pēc brīža.

Latvian diacritics are not optional

The marks above and below Latvian letters change which word it is, not merely how it sounds. Stripping them — which some older subtitle tooling still does on upload — produces text that is wrong rather than plain.

Open an exported file once to confirm they survived before you trust a workflow with a batch. When they do not, the cause is almost always an encoding setting.

Searching a Latvian transcript

Latvian is heavily inflected, so a term appears in a range of forms rather than repeating identically the way an English transcript would. That is correct output.

It does mean searching a transcript for a keyword will miss most of its occurrences unless you search for the stem — worth knowing before you use a transcript as an index.

Getting a better Latvian transcript

• Set the language to Latvian rather than leaving detection on, particularly for clips under a minute where there is little audio to judge from.
• Upload the highest-quality audio you have; compression artefacts cost more accuracy than most people expect.
• Check proper nouns, place names and numbers first — recognition errors concentrate there.
• Read the transcript before exporting. Latvian subtitles are editable up until you download them.

Latvian subtitles in another language

The same Latvian audio can produce subtitles in any of the 76 supported languages instead of in Latvian itself. English is the most common target, but every pair works, and the translated file keeps the original timings so it drops onto the same video unchanged.